Says it on the tin. When I say "from" I mean holds elected office, not just being born there.
Bill Clinton was the last small state President, and they're pretty few and far between. Why exactly is this?
By and large, most of the really small states are too extreme politically to produce viable candidates:
- HI and VT are much too liberal to produce candidates who would win over swing voters without severe losses
- AK and MT, though powerfully Republican, are less socially conservative than other GOP bastions, but their anti-Washington (and historically anti-big-business) tendencies would make them dubious
- WY, ID, ND, SD and UT are far too conservative to provide candidates who would win over the necessary swing voters
- The marginally larger states of WV, NE, KS and OK also stand too conservative to provide candidates who would win over necessary swing voters
- NM and NV are politically more marginal and growing states but they still do possess many traits of other states listed above that would make them not that likely to produce a viable nominee
As a last word, it is far to say that people from a small state, even if exceptionally talented, will not have as wide a perspective as people from a state as large as Texas.
Bill Clinton’s exceptional case is due to several factors:
- Ross Perot’s two candidacies which captured many “Reagan Democrats”
- His long-time status as a moderate Democratic Governor of a conservative (though populist-leaning) Ozark Bible Belt state
- The drift of the GOP towards positions too socially conservative for many of its former supporters in California and the suburban Northeast
- Democratic “moderation” as a reaction to the McGovern debacle of 1972 (when he won only 130 counties out of over 3,000) meant there were numerous moderate statewide Democrats in states (like Clinton’s) that had been strongly Republican relative to the nation in 1984 and 1988
